[TeMPOraL]

I don't think we should want to fight this. The way I see it, things increasingly tend to look like "privacy or the progress of mankind, pick one". There are tons and tons of potential benefits to society stemming from all that data being available for constant real-time processing, and I haven't seen any kind of analysis that would properly weight the costs and benefits. What we get is constant surveillence state fear mongering.

[happyscrappy]

This is a good, but probably unpopular, point. Even Stallman's info leaks everywhere. If his great lengths aren't enough where does that leave typical people? The article states satellites can recognize your face. At some point you throw up your hands and say I give up. On Star Trek no one seems to care that the Federation always knows where they are because they trust that their rights are respected uniformly. Attacking the problem from the standpoint of hiding all info about your doings is a castle made of sand.

[TeMPOraL]

Yes. I won't pretend I'm not scared of the bad consequences of the tech we have, be it oppressive governments or evil private companies. Though to be honest, it's something we had to deal with since the dawn of mankind, I don't think surveillance tech is anywhere close to the root of the problem.

Since you mentioned it, I grew up watching Star Trek and I guess it might have formed some of my views on society and technology. The technology present in that universe can - and sometimes is - abused, but like you said, they generally trust each other a lot, both on personal and on societal level. It's a way of life I try to follow and a future I hope we'll one day reach.

Pretty much everything again hinges not on the technology itself, but on how it can be used. There's a lot of good we can leverage even current level of "antiprivacy" technologies - optimizing agriculture, traffic and public health, learning more about ourselves and how societies evolve, improving the general well-being of everyone.

The last two or three generations seem to have grown up with irrational hate of centralized systems. Yes, distributed and democratized is great, but those systems also have their failure modes - many of which we see every day not only in technology, but in economy, politics. There are some things that are better done centralized, like any kind of optimizations. With the levels of computing power we have nowdays, I think we should embrace centralization some more.

Another thing - that I do need to check up with history books, but I feel that the current notion of "privacy" is an artificial construct, an artefact of growing urbanization. I can't imagine villages having any level of privacy similar to what people in cities nowdays consider a minimum standard.